But if people are so concerned with gratitude that
they don't speak their mind about what needs improvement, no one is being
served. JAWS is still better in a lot of employment situations and a few
years ago, even one or two of the main developers said this. Since then,
NVDA has become more capable in employment situations but it still has serious
drawbacks in a lot of cases.
I can appreciate NVDA and the work that went into
it but that has nothing to do with whether I or others should speak freely about
what needs improvement.
Historically, blind people have been expected to be
grateful. I appreciate things but I don't like the word grateful It
smaks of the days of rampant paternalism when blind people were expected to be
little better than charity cases. As I said, I can appreciate something
like NVDA but grateful is a different word with different and very unfavorable
connotations for what it means to be a blind person in modern times.
Gene
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2018 7:30 PM
Subject: [nvda] academics and employment
Hello,
It is Mike who was talking to you all earlier about copy and
paste. I am now on my personal e-mail.
I want to clarify what was said about the copy and paste
system on the web needing to be perfected, for NVDA to be adequate for college
and employment. Let us take a moment to think about what NVDA does for us,
because of the hundreds if not thousands of man hours of development put into
this. I pulled down the source from GitHub, after talking with Joseph Lee, to
gain an appreciation of what goes into building this thing. It is incredible. I
work for the Boeing Company. That is right. It is the same company that builds
all the airplanes and Defense, Space, and security systems. I use NVDA as my
primary screen reader in Git BASH, and Visual Studio Code. NVDA is what helped
me build the Angular template for Boeing’s frontend architecture reference
implementation. I only ever turn on JAWS, if I am using something highly
proprietary like Citrix.
Do I think NVDA could use some improvements that proprietary
screen readers have? Absolutely, but we must also remember the imperfections of
proprietary readers. NVDA is the best reader I have found that supports
Notepad++ and SQL Server Management Studio where JAWS repeats the lines, when I
down arrow. JAWS is also way more heavyweight, and crashes over the simplest
things. I cannot remember the last time NVDA froze.
Overall, what we need is an attitude of gratitude. NVDA is
plenty suited for education and employment, despite its imperfection and need
for a bit of improvement. Let me close out by saying use Microsoft Narrator
full-time for education and employment, or even Orca for Linux. They do not have
half the shit NVDA does.
Thank you so much for taking the time to volunteer and
develop NVDA. Keep up the great work! I will use NVDA until the day I die over
JAWS.
Mighty Mike
